1. Statement of the Technical Field
The inventive arrangements relate to methods and systems for facial recognition and more particularly to improved methods and systems for facial recognition in areas which utilize electronic article surveillance (EAS) systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Increasingly, retail stores need to combat organized retain crime (ORC). An ORC scenario typically involves a group of thieves who will steal large amounts of merchandise in one visit. Such persons will commonly trigger an EAS alarm when they leave the store with merchandise having an attached active EAS tag, but an alarm at such time may be too late. Retail store clerks are poorly equipped to deal with aggressive groups of persons intent on stealing, and in fact are frequently forbidden by employer guidelines from taking any action beyond verbal contact. Moreover, an EAS alarm initiated as a group of thieves is rushing out the exit is often too late to be of much use from a theft prevention standpoint.
Another EAS problem involves certain individuals who repeatedly engaging in shoplifting activities. Such individuals may initiate an EAS alarm as they are rushing out an exit door, but there is little a store clerk can do at such time to deal with the problem. Notably, the same person can subsequently travel to a second store location (sometimes of the same retail store chain) and continue his/her illicit activity because the person will not be known at the second store.
Electronic article surveillance (EAS) systems can include imaging devices to provide enhanced performance. For example, International Publication No. WO 2004/034347 discloses a system in which video surveillance is used with an EAS system. An EAS system incorporating video sensors is also described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,961,096. In that system, a video analysis process is used in combination with the EAS system. The video analysis process is capable of detecting the presence, location and motion of objects. To this end, it is disclosed that the video sensors can be positioned overhead of a pair of EAS pedestals or can be integrated directly into the pedestals (e.g. on top of a pedestal).
In certain RFID tag systems a trigger event (e.g. an RFID tag detection) can be used to determine when image media is captured or processed. For example, U.S. Publication No. 2012/0056722 discloses an RFID system in which a trigger event can automatically trigger certain processing, such as facial recognition processing. When an RFID badge is detected the system can automatically perform facial recognition to determine whether the face of a person in a captured image matches the person associated with the tagged badge ID.